The Wildest Things
Ten of our popular stories this past year.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve now written and published—in sickness and in health— 250 stories in sixty weekly editions of Wild Things. Here are a few stories that readers have said they love and that we do, too. Don’t think it wasn’t hard picking just ten!
PHOTOGRAPHY
MORE PHOTOS are available on Instagram and in free books on my web site. For photographs and stories of birds, see Bird Notes. A new Reader Digest, Wild Pictures & Words, collects Kerry’s writing on art and photography over the year.
YEAR OF THE HEART
1. My year as a patient
By Barbara Ramsey
A YEAR AGO on Halloween I noticed something was wrong. I went trick or treating with four-year-old Lu and his younger sister Millie on a short, candy-rich route that their mother had staked out. Mom brought along a wagon big enough to hold both of them, knowing they might flag in the face of so much excitement. Twenty minutes in, both kids opted to ride, so mom and I took turns pulling the wagon. During a short uphill stretch, not even half a block, I was suddenly out of breath. What was happening? I’m a little old lady, but a strong one, and pulling a wagon with two toddlers shouldn’t have left me breathless and out of steam. It was the first sign that I was having heart trouble and it began a year-long search for a diagnosis and successful treatment… SEE MORE.
Read more in the Reader Digest, Year of the Heart, a compilation of stories on Barbara’s surgery and recovery.
PERSONAL HISTORY
2. Father’s day
By Kerry Tremain
ONE OF THE KINDER WAYS to describe my father is that he was socially inappropriate, and nowhere more so than at his own funeral. Even his time of death was borderline rude. He had end-stage lung cancer when he requested that I give his eulogy, which was already a big ask, and then he died in Missouri on the day I arrived in Seattle for my sister-in-law’s summer wedding. I had to book an expensive last-minute flight that barely gave me time to fulfill my promise to the bride to make gazpacho for the reception. According to her gourmand cousin and my to-this-day shame, I shorted the jalapeños. Fortunately, I wasn’t there to see the politely disappointed look on the faces of the wedding guests when they took their first sip… SEE MORE.
TALES FROM THE CLINIC
3. The vaccine line
By Barbara Ramsey
MEASLES IS A TERRIBLE disease. Its complications include blindness, pneumonia, and encephalitis. It’s also more contagious than most infectious diseases. If ten people are infected with tuberculosis—not just exposed to it, but actually infected—odds are that only one will get sick. If you simply expose ten unvaccinated kids to measles, nine of them will probably get sick. Once they’re infected, up to twenty-five percent of them will require hospitalization. Few people remember it now, but there was a significant measles outbreak in New York City in 1989. It spread in waves and pulses to Philadelphia, the rest of the East Coast, and then westward to Chicago and beyond. Because vaccination rates were fairly good, the spread was slow. But in 1991, it arrived in the Bay Area. The local epicenter was Oakland, where my clinic, Native American Health Center, was located. People were scared. Images of kids in the ICU crowded the nightly news. They wanted the vaccine. Our clinic, in the middle of the hardest hit area, was ready… SEE MORE.
Read more in Tales from the Clinic, one of our Reader Digests.
TROUBLE ON THE LEFT
4. Slaying my inner pig
By Kerry Tremain
DURING MY FIRST summer in California, I divided my time between looking for a job and listening to the Watergate hearings on television. The hearings were riveting, the job search dispiriting. The economy was in poor shape and my recent degree in philosophy and psychology from a Baptist college in Missouri impressed no one. I did manage to get an interview for a job as a counselor in a summer camp. Fifteen minutes in, the interviewer, a guy with long hair in shorts and sandals, said, “I’m not going to hire you. Do you want to know why?” I nodded. “You’re not in touch with your feelings.” I left feeling insulted and worried he might be right. The following year, in 1974, I joined a “Radical Therapy” men’s group… SEE MORE.
For more in this vein, see the compilation of articles in the Reader Digest, Trouble on the Left.
TALES FROM ALABAMA
5. W.T. repels the raccoons
By Barbara Ramsey
MY MOTHER ALREADY HAD many friends in Alabama when she moved back there in the mid-1970’s. Then she made new ones. She quickly got to know her neighbors, well aware that life in the country depends on knowing folks. With frequent hurricanes off the Gulf of Mexico, it’s vital to be on good terms with the local roofer. Calling on a neighbor with a tractor is helpful if you’re looking to expand your tomato patch. Being friendly with the daughter-in-law of a certain judge can come in handy in all manner of situations. One of her new friends was W.T. Purvis, a local landowner whose family was long established in the county… SEE MORE.
More stories like this in the Reader Digest, Tales from Alabama.
YOSEMITE STORIES
6. The Grizzly and me
By Kerry Tremain
IN AN EXTRAORDINARY 1918 letter, a rancher named Robert Wellman recounted how he and a friend had killed one of Yosemite’s last two Grizzly bears thirty years earlier. Using a dead cow as bait, Wellman had lured the bear below a tree platform he’d built. From there, he shot and wounded the bear, and then climbed down the tree to finish him off… Nearly 130 years after the bear was slain, I tracked down his pelt and put it on public display… SEE MORE.
Yosemite Stories, from my exhibition and book for the California Historical Society, are compiled in the Reader Digest, Yosemite Wild Things. Also see: Wild Things Science.
ON LANGUAGE
7. Writing in beauty
By Barbara Ramsey
REBECCA WILD’S CALLIGRAPHY class could have been an ordinary one: bakers who needed more legible cakes, artsy college students wanting to improve their handwriting, tattoo artists perfecting their Gothic script. But Rebecca was an extraordinary calligraphy teacher and one day in 2009 she met someone even more extraordinary. Ibrahima Barry was a slight, soft-spoken African man in his early thirties with an accent that required close listening. Rebecca learned that he wanted to improve his script, but she had no idea what script and no inkling of the long road that had led him to her class. That road had begun almost two decades earlier in a Fulani neighborhood in Guinea, West Africa… SEE MORE.
More stories like this in the Reader Digest, Wild Things on Language.
PERSONAL HISTORY
8. When counterculture came to the Bible Belt
By Kerry Tremain
THE HOBBIT HOLE, a head shop I helped start and run in 1970, was an act of imagination whose origins are hazy to me now. As I remember, there were four of us—Alita, Maggie, John, and me—but Alita dropped out shortly after introducing me to the other two. Together, we sold counterculture paraphernalia in Coffeyville, a conservative town of 13,000 in southeast Kansas… SEE MORE.
More youthful adventures: The Town, Parts I, II, and III, and Mother’s days,
TALES FROM THE CLINIC
9. Lotte’s escape
By Barbara Ramsey
DURING MY LAST MONTH as an intern, Paul, one of the other doctors in the clinic, pulled me over and told me he wanted to introduce me to a patient. Paul was in his final year and planned to leave Seattle after graduation. Most of the people he’d been caring for during his three years of training would be automatically assigned to other doctors. But Paul arranged personal transfers for a few patients. He wanted to place someone special in my care. I was slightly alarmed. “Special” patients often had major psychiatric diagnoses or difficult personality quirks. Paul reassured me. “She’s complicated and she’s wonderful,” he said. “I think you’ll like her.”… SEE MORE.
More on Jews and Nazis: A Latvian grandmother’s surprise and A Dutch master in wartime.
YEAR OF THE HEART
10. I want to hold your hand
By Kerry Tremain
IN MY EARLIEST memory, I’m walking down the alley behind our St. Louis flat with a little girl, holding her hand. We’re on our way to kindergarten. I can’t say with any certainty that it truly happened. I do know the image lodged in my brain at an early age and stuck. In the movies, a first kiss signifies mutual desire. In life, a first and lasting gesture of affection is to wrap your fingers together. As a teenage boy eager for such attention from a girl, the feeling when it happened was electric. It made me happy inside. Even earlier, with my hand in my mother’s, I knew I was safe… SEE MORE.
This story also appears in Year of the Heart, a Reader Digest on Barbara’s surgery and recovery.
More highlights
Editor’s Note: Picking the top ten stories got a little crazy and led me to design a whole new section of Wild Things entitled Reader Digests, which appears as a tab at the top of our Substack web page. Included are nine summaries of articles we’ve published, organized by topic: For the Love of Type, Tales from Alabama, Tales from the Clinic, Trouble on the Left, Pictures & Words, On Language, Science, Year of the Heart, and Yosemite. Two other collections, Bird Notes and Photo Books, are available on my web site. As always, your comments are welcome. What do YOU think should have made the top ten? –Kerry
OTHER POPULAR STORIES included Linda Okazaki’s Color of dreams, Four things I learned in Norway (with slideshow), Here’s your damn senior moment, the origins of Wild Olympic Salmon, ongoing reports on the local Chemakum tribe, Sherlock’s illogic, Catholic school torture, and The Presidio bust. Plus, who could forget young Barbara on skates facing down bullies?
READER VIDEO FAVORITES: Sump’n Claus, White Rabbit, Singing Ted Lasso stars, The Marat craze, Echo, King Cubby, and Josh Johnson on Man vs. Bears. Oh, and we love Elle Cordova. But the sleeper hit, from the story Walter Munk: Einstein of the Ocean, was this video straight from your high school science class.
